Quantum wells go metallic
Tai Chang Chiang and co-workers at Urbana confined electrons in thin films of silver ranging from 1 monolayer to around 100 monolayers thick. Just as photons resonate back and forth in an optical Fabr...
Still uncertain about Heisenberg
“Heisenberg is an intelligent man, but a typical German (that is to say a Tacitus).” So wrote Albert Einstein to his Swiss confidant Carl Seelig, in January 1953. Although the quotation do...
Putting the quantum brakes on light
Electromagnetically induced transparency relies on interference between different electronic transitions in an atom and has been used to make opaque media transparent at certain wavelengths in the pas...
Wigner crystal found
Normal metals have an equal number of electrons with spin “up” and spin “down”. However, when there are more spins pointing up than down, or vice versa, the metal becomes a fer...
The force of acoustics
“The idea of using white noise to mimic zero-point fluctuations is clever, ” said Steve Lamoreaux of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. “The fundamentals are quite different f...
Quantum physics breakthrough wins Nobel Prize
Two of the physicists, Horst L. Störmer from Columbia University, New York, and Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, discovered the effect – called the fractional qu...
Field theorists win Dirac prize
The citation highlights Adler’s derivation of a sum rule for pion-nucleon scattering that marked a breakthrough in our understanding of the currents and broken symmetries of the strong interacti...
Talking physics with the Dalai Lama
Zeilinger had invited the Dalai Lama to his laboratory following a meeting at Dharamsala in Northern India last October at which he and four other physicists had, over the course of five days, discuss...
A new spin on nuclei
Magnetic rotation is a new phenomenon that is forcing physicists to rethink their understanding of what goes on inside the nucleus
Read article: A new spin on nuclei
Gamma-ray bursts could test quantum gravity
Gamma-ray bursts appear to be related to the deaths of massive stars. Amelino-Camelia and colleagues claim that if the difference in the arrival times of photons with different energies can be measure...
